6 ms·

Nobody buys Macs to use as servers outside of a very small workgroup-like market, usually for creative houses. DEFINITELY nobody is picking them up as "mysql a

by flyt 15y ago

Nobody buys Macs to use as servers outside of a very small workgroup-like market, usually for creative houses. DEFINITELY nobody is picking them up as "mysql and apache servers instead of linux" because OSX is a terrible server OS and not worth the cost.

bugsy 15y ago
OK, so what are they using them for then?
- gallerytungsten 15y ago
  Design, marketing, and advertising departments; and probably also executives with enough clout to buy whatever they want.
- teyc 15y ago
  I'd imagine even the likes of IBM having to buy Macs because they need to develop for the iPad, which is a serious brand new market territory.
  - bugsy 15y ago
    I'd like to thank you for your reply. That's a good point, it seems like nearly every company has some sort of iApp for iPad/iPhone/iOS out - a good portion of the increase could be development machines to support this. I also want to note that you are the only person among many responses I see that had a thoughtful response to explain what the increase in sales might be due to. It was disappointing to see so many other posts talking about why they believe OS X sucks. That may be true or not, but doesn't help with understanding what is the cause behind that statistics in the cited article.
    - teyc 15y ago
      You are welcome. The tech company I work for ($20m RD budget), long having been a Microsoft shop, now has a neat line of Macs. The iDevices have got so good that we could no longer ignore them.
- munchhausen 15y ago
  I have a friend that works at a company which is in the print media business and the entire staff uses Macs by decree. They also use OSX Server for common office needs like file-sharing and VPN, probably because it's the path of least resistance - they can afford to have their IT support staff trained only on Mac OSX, don't have to struggle with potential MacOSX <-> Samba interoperability issues, etc.. (Interestingly, their web-servers are Linux boxes, run by contractors.) It is my understanding that this is a pretty common scenario as far as OSX Server use cases are concerned.
  - teilo 15y ago
    I can understand this, but only in shops that don't have on-staff Linux people. My company is rather Mac heavy, but we run Linux fileservers. Way more bang-for-the-buck. That said, there are still problems: poor AFP performance when fetching directory listings from a large filesystem, and the necessity of using resource-fork-aware mv,rm,mkdir, etc., commands when on the Linux shell, in order to preserve metadata and resource forks.
    - duskwuff 15y ago
      > … and the necessity of using resource-fork-aware mv,rm,mkdir, etc., commands when on the Linux shell, in order to preserve metadata and resource forks. What still uses resource forks? I can't speak for your company, but the only files with resource forks I still have around are historical curiosities. Modern OS X apps generally don't use them at all.
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  OS X Server has some good built-in applications, like Podcast Producer, which can serve as the centerpiece of a video capture / workflow / conversion / uploading / streaming platform. Some colleges use it for lecture capture. It's pretty decent by itself. However, the logical extension is iTunes U which is devoid of any real support, except via a forum, and an email system which sends out the dumbest canned responses I've ever read. I tried for several weeks to get iTunes U set up properly, and no amount of expensive deluxe enterprise support could do the job. Even on a priority ticket, Apple techs and my sales rep told me repeatedly, "Uh, support for that is via email only." And then the canned email responses were utterly Kafka-esque, as in, "Oh gee, did you break your iPod? Did you lose a file on your hard drive?" When I called in desperation to their iTunes support (as they instructed in the email), they could not get past their own support screen which demanded a product serial number. For iTunes U? No serial number, no service, next! Thank you, come again! I'm an enterprise customer. Or was. The rest of Apple enterprise support is solid, but if you're just setting up iTunes U in 2011, it's a ghetto. It's so bad that after months of training, evaluation, vendor selection etc., after investing tens of thousands in Apple hardware, software, training and enterprise support, we killed the project because the iTunes U part was just brain-dead support-wise. That, and we started to feel like we were just shilling for Apple's proprietary stack, paying for the privilege, and then getting the insult of hearing "there's an app for that." Yeah, but where's the support? We paid a lot to find out it doesn't exist for iTunes U. So that's why I'm a tad disillusioned about enterprise Apple. (I've been Microsoft-free for 12 years, by the way.)
FaceKicker 15y ago
> DEFINITELY nobody is picking them up as "mysql and apache servers instead of linux" because OSX is a terrible server OS and not worth the cost. "Not worth the cost" I can certainly see, but why is it a "terrible server OS"? Not saying you're wrong and I'm not in a position to argue the opposite, just curious.
- X-Istence 15y ago
  From personal experience, the issue is that Mac OS X likes to hide a lot of stuff behind graphic user interfaces, sure you can set it up manually and configure it, and tune it, but the next person to come along and to fire up the graphic interface may break it. The other issue is that Mac OS X just isn't tuned for serving a lot of requests, Mac OS X Server is fine for calendaring and the other applications that come standard with it, and I would even suggest them just for ease of use, but for mainstream server applications you are better off with Linux/FreeBSD and for much cheaper as well hardware wise.
  - rjbond3rd 15y ago
    Interesting. But doesn't Apple's own (evidently adequate) infrastructure run on OS X? Regarding your experiences, could you be more specific as to what manual configuration might get broken by the GUI? Also, regarding tuning, are you talking about app-level tuning (like Apache) or OS-level tuning? I'm curious because I'm a UNIX person without OS X knowledge.
    - X-Istence 15y ago
      I'm talking about stuff like sysctl tuning, the firewall (which got replaced on the next system update ...), application level tuning, changing log locations, stuff like that. Haven't used it in a couple of years now... might no longer be an issue.
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29 The kernel design it uses (while having some advantages) is unfortunately slow at many tasks, which is detrimental to server performance. After years of tuning they've got it working well enough for the local user I suppose. Not sure if it will ever be able to perform as quickly as a monolithic kernel such as linux.

by flyt 15y ago

bugsy 15y ago

OK, so what are they using them for then?

gallerytungsten 15y ago
Design, marketing, and advertising departments; and probably also executives with enough clout to buy whatever they want.
teyc 15y ago
I'd imagine even the likes of IBM having to buy Macs because they need to develop for the iPad, which is a serious brand new market territory.
- bugsy 15y ago
  I'd like to thank you for your reply. That's a good point, it seems like nearly every company has some sort of iApp for iPad/iPhone/iOS out - a good portion of the increase could be development machines to support this. I also want to note that you are the only person among many responses I see that had a thoughtful response to explain what the increase in sales might be due to. It was disappointing to see so many other posts talking about why they believe OS X sucks. That may be true or not, but doesn't help with understanding what is the cause behind that statistics in the cited article.
  - teyc 15y ago
    You are welcome. The tech company I work for ($20m RD budget), long having been a Microsoft shop, now has a neat line of Macs. The iDevices have got so good that we could no longer ignore them.
munchhausen 15y ago
I have a friend that works at a company which is in the print media business and the entire staff uses Macs by decree. They also use OSX Server for common office needs like file-sharing and VPN, probably because it's the path of least resistance - they can afford to have their IT support staff trained only on Mac OSX, don't have to struggle with potential MacOSX <-> Samba interoperability issues, etc.. (Interestingly, their web-servers are Linux boxes, run by contractors.) It is my understanding that this is a pretty common scenario as far as OSX Server use cases are concerned.
- teilo 15y ago
  I can understand this, but only in shops that don't have on-staff Linux people. My company is rather Mac heavy, but we run Linux fileservers. Way more bang-for-the-buck. That said, there are still problems: poor AFP performance when fetching directory listings from a large filesystem, and the necessity of using resource-fork-aware mv,rm,mkdir, etc., commands when on the Linux shell, in order to preserve metadata and resource forks.
  - duskwuff 15y ago
    > … and the necessity of using resource-fork-aware mv,rm,mkdir, etc., commands when on the Linux shell, in order to preserve metadata and resource forks. What still uses resource forks? I can't speak for your company, but the only files with resource forks I still have around are historical curiosities. Modern OS X apps generally don't use them at all.
rjbond3rd 15y ago
OS X Server has some good built-in applications, like Podcast Producer, which can serve as the centerpiece of a video capture / workflow / conversion / uploading / streaming platform. Some colleges use it for lecture capture. It's pretty decent by itself. However, the logical extension is iTunes U which is devoid of any real support, except via a forum, and an email system which sends out the dumbest canned responses I've ever read. I tried for several weeks to get iTunes U set up properly, and no amount of expensive deluxe enterprise support could do the job. Even on a priority ticket, Apple techs and my sales rep told me repeatedly, "Uh, support for that is via email only." And then the canned email responses were utterly Kafka-esque, as in, "Oh gee, did you break your iPod? Did you lose a file on your hard drive?" When I called in desperation to their iTunes support (as they instructed in the email), they could not get past their own support screen which demanded a product serial number. For iTunes U? No serial number, no service, next! Thank you, come again! I'm an enterprise customer. Or was. The rest of Apple enterprise support is solid, but if you're just setting up iTunes U in 2011, it's a ghetto. It's so bad that after months of training, evaluation, vendor selection etc., after investing tens of thousands in Apple hardware, software, training and enterprise support, we killed the project because the iTunes U part was just brain-dead support-wise. That, and we started to feel like we were just shilling for Apple's proprietary stack, paying for the privilege, and then getting the insult of hearing "there's an app for that." Yeah, but where's the support? We paid a lot to find out it doesn't exist for iTunes U. So that's why I'm a tad disillusioned about enterprise Apple. (I've been Microsoft-free for 12 years, by the way.)

FaceKicker 15y ago

> DEFINITELY nobody is picking them up as "mysql and apache servers instead of linux" because OSX is a terrible server OS and not worth the cost. "Not worth the cost" I can certainly see, but why is it a "terrible server OS"? Not saying you're wrong and I'm not in a position to argue the opposite, just curious.

X-Istence 15y ago
From personal experience, the issue is that Mac OS X likes to hide a lot of stuff behind graphic user interfaces, sure you can set it up manually and configure it, and tune it, but the next person to come along and to fire up the graphic interface may break it. The other issue is that Mac OS X just isn't tuned for serving a lot of requests, Mac OS X Server is fine for calendaring and the other applications that come standard with it, and I would even suggest them just for ease of use, but for mainstream server applications you are better off with Linux/FreeBSD and for much cheaper as well hardware wise.
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  Interesting. But doesn't Apple's own (evidently adequate) infrastructure run on OS X? Regarding your experiences, could you be more specific as to what manual configuration might get broken by the GUI? Also, regarding tuning, are you talking about app-level tuning (like Apache) or OS-level tuning? I'm curious because I'm a UNIX person without OS X knowledge.
  - X-Istence 15y ago
    I'm talking about stuff like sysctl tuning, the firewall (which got replaced on the next system update ...), application level tuning, changing log locations, stuff like that. Haven't used it in a couple of years now... might no longer be an issue.
mixmastamyk 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29 The kernel design it uses (while having some advantages) is unfortunately slow at many tasks, which is detrimental to server performance. After years of tuning they've got it working well enough for the local user I suppose. Not sure if it will ever be able to perform as quickly as a monolithic kernel such as linux.